Job Description:    Vice President of Engineering, reporting to CEO

Author:                Ben Slivka, Chairman and Co-Founder

Summary

The successful candidate will establish, elaborate, and evolve our Culture of Engineering as he builds and leads his team in the design, development, and deployment of our web service.

The successful candidate will work effectively to leverage the passion, experience, and vision of the company while balancing the day-to-day and strategic business priorities.

 
Until the engineering team grows larger, a successful candidate will also design systems, write specifications and code, perform code reviews, debug and fix nasty bugs, and perform all of the other skills of a world-class software design engineer.

The successful candidate will describe his job thusly: “My role is to set the high level goals, get the right people in the right jobs — where they can leverage their strengths and work on their weaknesses — while I coach.  I try to push down authority with responsibility as deeply into the organization as possible.  I also represent the customer to make sure we meet our goals.”

Our Vision

We envision a world where every student enjoys a personally engaging, world-class learning experience that prepares him for success in college, work, and life.

Our Mission

Our mission is to build a massively-scalable information technology platform for delivering pedagogy-neutral, world-class learning experience.  We will build a character-driven, lean, flexible, nimble, learning organization ideally suited to achieving our vision.

Our Values

We hire for Character first, Culture-fit second, and Intelligence third.

The successful candidate will demonstrate SchoolSoft’s values in these ways:

 Reliable:  We want our customers, suppliers, and employees to be able to rely upon us without question.  This takes many forms, including: a) we treat our customers, suppliers, and employees with respect; b) we communicate clearly, regularly, and transparently; c) we under-promise and over-deliver; d) our systems demonstrate 99.999%+ uptime; e) our systems are engineered to be quickly and easily improved; and f) the student experience improves over time, with no sudden or shocking changes;

Thoughtful:  A key near-term business objective is to deliver an initial product to customers so that we can start learning iterating.  We also have a long-term strategic imperative to build a massively-scalable, reliable web service.  So the successful candidate will:  a) balance the short-term pragmatic needs with the long-term strategic goals, giving each its due; b) help the engineering team explore potential alternatives, tempering quantitative analysis with experience; and c) minimize navel gazing.

Neutral:  As SchoolSoft grows, we have the potential to have a very large impact on how students learn.  So we need to approach many areas with few preconceived notions.  Politics and Pedagogy are two obvious areas where “choosing sides” will not help SchoolSoft achieve its Vision.  We should also be neutral when it comes to technology:  a) we should not dogmatically embrace or advance one operating system, programming language, hardware platform, or software tool above all others; b) we should not dogmatically embrace “open source” vs. “proprietary solutions”; c) we should be careful not to wed ourselves too closely to any one supplier, especially for hardware, software, and internet connectivity; and d) we should make pragmatic, appropriate, and timely choices in each of these areas, and be prepared to make changes as business and strategic needs change.

Frugal:  A successful candidate will: a) buy commodity software and hardware where appropriate; b) be creative in finding less expensive ways to buy goods and services; c) set a good example for his team by having the smaller office without the view, less fancy office furniture, bringing a sack lunch, etc.; d) not insist on lavish, Google-style creature comforts (incredible array of free snacks and drinks, free catered lunch every day, massage chairs, etc.!), but e) not be penny-wise and pound-foolish;

Fun:  A successful candidate will create an environment where his team enjoys coming to work and working hard.  There are many books and publications on this topic, but Peopleware, 2^nd Edition, is an excellent example.  It contains many anecdotes about failed software projects, and points out many key truisms about software developers and software engineering projects.  At bottom, involving the team in key decisions – including product features and milestones – is critical, as the team understands the why and buys into the how and when.

Experience

The successful candidate has built and lead teams of strong software design engineers, software test engineers, program managers, project managers, system administrators, database administrators, and web designers to build, deploy, and operate world class web services.

He has also experienced significant failures, as failure teaches many more lessons than success.  But he is also winner with a proven track record – nothing portends success better than success.

The successful candidate has significant hands-on experience with many different computer architectures, programming languages, operating systems, application architectures, distributed computing, source code control systems, and bug tracking systems.

Education

The successful candidate will have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.  A Master’s degree in Computer Science would be fine. 

The successful candidate is a student of human nature, but he also enjoys reading an academic paper describing the Google File System or a recent patent application from Isilon Systems.